What’s Next in Iraq and Syria?

Shiite volunteers in Iraq defend an area south of Baghdad against ISIS.Credit Photograph by Alaa Al-Marjani / Reuters

On his first full day back from vacation, President Barack Obama could be forgiven for wishing he were still on Martha’s Vineyard. With confirmation that ISIS fighters have just captured another military base from the government forces of President Assad, and that Qatar has engineered the release of an American freelance journalist who was being held by a non-ISIS jihadist group, Obama has two formidable challenges to deal with.

The immediate task for Obama is deciding whether to launch American bombing raids on ISIS positions inside Syria, while simultaneously preparing his Administration, and the country at large, for the possibility of another video showing an American hostage being butchered. The ISIS militants, having carefully orchestrated the beheading of James Foley following the launch of U.S. strikes inside Iraq, will surely seek to exploit the fate of its remaining American hostages for maximum effect. Any U.S. decision to expand its air campaign is almost certain to be met with the release of more snuff films.

No President—no American—could take such a prospect lightly. At the same time, Obama has to guard against allowing emotion and wishful thinking to take over U.S. policy. That’s what happened after 9/11, and some of the chaos that we now see in the Middle East can be traced back to that historic blunder. What’s needed is calm cost-benefit analysis of the options open to the United States, taking account of its strategic interests, its values, and its capabilities. In short, we need what Danny Kahneman, the Princeton psychologist who pioneered behavioral economics, would refer to as some Type 2 thinking: a disciplined weighing of the likely consequences of our actions. If we give into our Type 1 reaction—horror, outrage, anger—we will be playing into the hands of the jihadists.

One place to start is by acknowledging two errors in thinking that have blighted U.S. policy in the past decade: the conservative delusion that the United States could, more or less single-handedly, use its military power to reinvent the Middle East, and the liberal illusion that we could simply walk away from the mess that Bush, Cheney & Co. created. Without the political willingness and the financial capability to garrison the region in the manner of postwar Germany and Japan, U.S. influence has to be exercised through air power, political proxies, economic inducements, and regional alliances. But that doesn’t diminish the fact that the United States and other Western countries have vital interests at stake, one of which is preventing the emergence of a rogue Islamic state that would provide a rallying point, and a safe haven, for anti-Western jihadists the world over.

Looking back, it took the Obama Administration a long time to acknowledge the nature of the threat from ISIS, which has been rampaging through northern Syria and western Iraq for a couple of years. In recent weeks, though, the President has referred to it as “a cancer,” and has stated bluntly that the United States won’t allow the establishment of a caliphate, which is the organization’s stated goal. ISIS’s capture of Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, surprised many American analysts, who had dismissed the group as a ragtag army, and its subsequent progress towards Erbil, the capital of the Kurdish region, persuaded Obama to overcome his reluctance to move beyond dispatching a few hundred military advisers to assist the Kurdish and Iraqi forces.

With several towns and an important dam already recaptured from ISIS, the U.S. air strikes are having an impact. (It’s difficult to acknowledge it publicly, but the fact that ISIS has resorted to killing hostages may be another indication that the U.S. air strikes are tilting the military balance.) Suggestions that the U.S. bombing would be extended to targets inside Syria appear to have been premature, though. Travelling to Afghanistan on Sunday, General Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that he wouldn’t recommend air strikes inside Syrian territory unless it was determined that ISIS represented a direct threat to the United States. At this stage, Dempsey said, there was no sign that Islamic militants were involved in “active plotting against the homeland, so it’s different than that which we see in Yemen.”

That may be true. Should more U.S. captives be executed, however, the President will come under pressure to go after ISIS targets inside Syria. Appearing on the Sunday talk shows, several senior Republicans, including Senator John McCain, advocated such an escalation. “We have missed dozens and dozens of opportunities to take really bad people off the battlefield in the recent—last two years,” McCain said. As a longtime supporter of U.S. military intervention in Syria, the Arizona senator is hardly an unbiased observer. But, if the goal is to defeat ISIS rather than merely contain it, targeting some of its leaders, wherever they are located, is certainly an option. That’s what the U.S. has done in confronting jihadist groups in places like Afghanistan and Yemen.

However, contemplating sending U.S. planes or drones across the Syrian border raises the question of whether the U.S. government needs to first reach some sort of accommodation with President Bashar al-Assad’s government, which on Monday warned the United States against launching unilateral air strikes. “Syria is ready to coöperate and coördinate on the regional and international level in the war on terror,” Walid al-Moallem, the Syrian foreign minister, said. “But any effort to combat terrorism should be coördinated with the Syrian government…. Any strike which isn’t coördinated with the government will be considered as aggression.”

Some British politicians and generals have expressed support for teaming up with Assad. Citing the wartime alliance with Stalin against Hitler, Sir Malcolm Rifkind, a former foreign secretary, told the BBC, “Sometimes you have to develop relationships with people who are extremely nasty in order to get rid of people who are even nastier.”

As longtime skeptics about the prospects of the moderate opposition to Assad, which has largely fallen by the wayside as ISIS and other extremist groups have advanced, President Obama and his closest advisers might be tempted by such realpolitik. Assad, for all his faults, has the military capacity to turn the U.S.-Iraqi counteroffensive against ISIS into a pincer movement, and he has demonstrated that, if the inducements are right, he can stick by international agreements. (Syria’s chemical weapons are now gone.) The U.S. acceded to a military government retaking power in Egypt. Why wouldn’t it enter an alliance of convenience with the Syrian dictator?

The objections to this idea go beyond morality. One key to stabilizing Iraq and the surrounding area is to appeal to the Sunni population, providing them with a meaningful political role, a stake in the future, and an alternative to jihadism. Teaming up with a ruler who is a member of the Alawite sect, an offshoot of Shia Islam, and whose forces have been dropping barrel bombs on Sunni neighborhoods and have killed many thousands of Sunni civilians, hardly jibes with such an ambition. In the words of Philip Hammond, the current British foreign secretary: “It would poison what we are trying to achieve in separating moderate Sunni opinion from the poisonous ideology of ISIL.”

Absent a formal agreement with Assad, the United States could simply ignore his objections and press ahead with strikes on ISIS targets in Syria, using drones or cruise missiles launched from outside Syria. Ultimately, however, the U.S. can’t bomb its way to victory over the jihadists. The real keys to success lie in mobilizing the Kurdish and Iraqi forces to repel the jihadist fighters, engineering some sort of resolution to the disastrous Syrian civil war, and closing down ISIS’s international support network. That means keeping up the pressure on Iraqi politicians to form a more representative national government, trying to resurrect the Syrian peace talks, and, perhaps, sending more U.S. military trainers into Iraq. It also means exerting some real pressure on U.S. allies in the region that have been enabling and financing the jihadists inside Syria: Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey come to mind. Without the support, or the tacit encouragement, of any sovereign state, ISIS would be a much weaker force.

Still, even on this side of the Atlantic, confidence in the U.S.’s ability to engineer a good outcome is at a low. In a recent article, Richard Haass, the president of the Council of Foreign Relations, who served in the Administrations of both Bush Presidents, said that the United States should accept that the nations of the Middle East are destined for decades of turmoil and largely leave them to it. In his scenario, the U.S. would accept a breakup of Iraq along sectarian lines, leave Assad in power, and concentrate on preventing nuclear proliferation, combatting terrorism, and developing new forms of energy. “Policymakers must recognize their limits,” Haass wrote. “For now and for the foreseeable future—until a new local order emerges or exhaustion sets in—the Middle East will be less a problem to be solved than a condition to be managed.”

That is arguably a counsel of despair. But who, having the viewed the events of the past decade or so, can provide a more optimistic reading? The task falls on President Obama, who is also feeling the weight of history. Asked a few weeks ago by Tom Friedman if he thought he was present at the disintegration of the postwar order, Obama said, “There are a bunch of places where good news keeps coming,” and he cited countries like Indonesia and Chile. But, he added, “I do believe that what we’re seeing in the Middle East and parts of North Africa is an order that dates back to World War I starting to buckle.”

That’s hard to argue with. The question is whether the United States will now stand aside and let things fall down pell-mell, or whether it will seek to bolster the existing foundations, putting in a new padstone here and I-beam there. In deciding to confront ISIS, albeit from a distance, and by demanding the ouster of Nouri al-Maliki, the former Prime Minister of Iraq, the Obama Administration is, after some hesitation, pursuing the latter course. At this stage, though, nobody can be sure where it leads.